"Thanks very much; you're a brick. Just sit down and smoke a cigarette, you'll find some good old cognac in that decanter, while I wash my hands and brush up." These two young men had been friends for more than half their lives. They had been chums in old Westminster as boys, were at Cambridge together, and at the same college; but since they had been in town their separate paths in life had gradually diverged, so that now they saw but little of each other. Thomas Hudson--Tommy Hudson as his intimates called him--had taken up the Bar as a profession. He was a pleasant young Irishman of twenty-seven or thereabouts. His practice was a small one, and what there was of it he had acquired rather by impudence than by knowledge of law. He was to be found in the Criminal and Police Courts; and solicitors had discovered his value in a certain class of cases. He was good on a losing side. No one could talk down this bold young gentleman. He would retort wittily to Sergeant Buzfuz, and turn the laugh against some insolent old counsel, who thought to brow-beat so young an opponent--for Tommy, with his fresh complexion and his merry Irish eyes, appeared younger even than he was. But his was an inferior sort of a practice, one that did not benefit his reputation, one that was not likely to improve or lead to anything better. His income, if calculated from his fee-book, was small, but still smaller was the reality. The solicitors who were on his books were not the most respectable of their profession, and oftener than not, forgot to hand over to Counsel the honorarium which they had taken very good care to extract from their clients. But as Tommy had a small private income, he managed to scrape along somehow, though he was generally head over heels in debt, and in a chronic state of being "clean broke," as he himself jovially described it to his friends. Like many other young barristers of small practice, he was Bohemian in his ways: he frequented taverns, was often an associate of not over-respectable characters, had rather drifted out of the society of ladies, and indeed voted as slow any party at which a fair amount of Bohemian freedom did not prevail. A merry supper-party, at which the feminine element was represented by frolicsome young actresses from the burlesque theatres, was far more to his taste than the duller entertainments of Mrs. Grundy. Careless, generous, with little evil in him, though his moral code was not such as finds favour everywhere out of Bohemia, he was not naturally a bad sort of a fellow, but being weak of will, was too easily influenced by his surroundings, a fault which embraces every other. On the other hand, his friend Duncan, who enjoyed no private income, was a struggling physician. His was a profounder and stronger nature; not so generally emotional as Hudson, he was yet capable of far fiercer passions and deeper feelings when they were aroused.